Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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This is hilarious, but a useful illustration of how people come to think of LLMs as useless. Claude in an agentic harness (e.g. Claude code) easily researches new APIs and figures out how to get information out of them. For example, I was trying to get historical heat index information and CC presented several possible data sources, I asked if it could use a different one, and it looked at it and figured out how to call the API and extract the relevant info.
I agree, but it goes to the heart of my fundamental disagreement with the way AI is presented to the public. If Claude Code does that, that's great, but I wouldn't think I needed a coding LLM to look up basic statistical data from government sources. So whn someone like me who wants to use it for other things that seem like are in its wheelhouse try it and get crap for a result, we get pissed off. Believe me, this is only one of the LLM-assisted fails I've experienced in the past month. So I get the inevitable response of "Well, if you were using the frontier deluxe model that costs $200 a month..." at which point I cut you off and say "No. This software hasn't given me any indication that it's worth $20/month, let alone $200." It's like a mirage, where what I'm looking for is always off in the distance but I never seem to get there. We're now at a point where companies in perhaps the only industry in history that's worth a trillion dollars despite not being profitable at all have to use all that compute power to subsidize nonsense from the trivial (AI girlfriends) to the actively harmful (cheating on term papers) because they've relied on a business model where they'll grow rapidly by creating a hype cycle that allows them to raise eye-watering sums from venture capital to develop an expensive product with limited commercial use.
In a rational world, OpenAI would have remained a research nonprofit that allowed things like universities and the government to use its models for free until they had developed to the point that there was a viable commercial use for them other than creating glorified chatbots. And when that point came, the hype cycle would hopefully be muted enough that companies wouldn't implement them unless they were seeing real returns. Instead they've created this world where they've spent more money than they could ever hope to earn creating products that don't make money and still have pathetic monetization rates that they've gotten into the habit of offering to the general public for free. And they keep creating more bullshit to justify it like "inference is profitable". Really? Because when I hear that, I hear "If we ignore all of our expenses except one category, the company makes money". It's like justifying pouring money into a failing retail outlet because you sell every item for less than you paid the supplier for it. "We're profitable if you only look at COGS!" And even that isn't entirely the truth, since a large percentage of this revenue from inference comes from other AI startups like Perplexity that are themselves unprofitable hype machines propped up by venture capital. I apologize for the rant, but if you want me to believe in this technology that fails to do everything I ask it to that it could theoretically do faster than I can myself, you can't keep telling me that it's only because I'm not paying enough money. Because I'm sure that when Oeuvre or whatever they call the next Claude model comes out that cost ten times as much to train and five times as much to run, I'll be told that Opus or CC or whatever couldn't handle it but if I only paid the price of admission all my problems would be solved.
Edit: I ran the query again and it did try to code something to get access to the API, but was unsuccessful. It also failed to recognize that a lot of this data, if not all of it, doesn't require access to the API and is available in PDF documents available on third-party websites.
You don't at all. AI doesn't unlock this ability for you, it just means you can say "get me XYZ data from ABC source" and then go jerk off and it's collected (hopefully) when you're back. The unlock in many many cases is the automation, not the capability.
I'm a big AI fan and it pisses me off all the time. It's simultaneously very smart, and simultaneously very retarded, sometimes on the same task.
That's fine if you don't think so. Don't pay for it? The $20 plans are insanely good value, although they are in the process of enshittifying them as we speak. I currently pay for the $200 plan as I'm using a lot of tokens right now as I code myself some websites/tools I always wished existed, but I do not plan to pay for it much longer as I'm (hopefully) almost done.
I also use it a TON at work, it's deeply useful and changing everything I do at my white collar finance type job.
The $20 plan and the $200 plan basically only differ in the amount of compute you get. Although both OpenAI and Google offer a smarter model at this tier. I quite like ChatGPT "pro" and it is noticably better than their "thinking" mode but not 10x better.
The real capability gap is those using the free vs those paying $20. What you get on the free tier is worse than useless. Instant mode should never be used by anyone. To
Have you missed the whole "agentic coding" thing? Or all the stuff about Mythos (is a lot of it marketing? Yes. Is a lot of it also real? Yes).
This does seem like a silly call on their part, we'll see how that shakes out.
You're kind of being ignorant here. They make money selling AI compute, then they spend a bajillion times that on R&D. The implication here is that if they stopped training models, they could comfortably sell ChatGPT5.x or Opus4.x at a tidy margin.
Of course, they can't right now, because any company who stops setting giant piles of money on fire to train a better model will lose market share to those who do. Which also kind of proves the point that there's utility here...
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To be clear, you can use Claude code with the $20 a month plan. You can even use something like opencode and a cheaper model paid by the token on openrouter. Or you can even run a local model like Gemma for ~free once you have the hardware.
Despite the name, it isn't really coding specific. I presume "Claude cowork" is largely the same as Claude code but with a name that doesn't scare the hos.
I do recognize the frustration that Claude can't look up the API details through the web interface. Perhaps there's some security considerations and they didn't want to have the . model call arbitrary endpoints.
As far as profitability goes, we shall only know when these companies IPO or go bust, but Anthropic revenue growth is massive.
From what I can recall, Cowork was announced back when Claude Code was still only available through the terminal, and Cowork was the easy ho-accessible version. And then they make Claude Code available through the Claude app anyway, so not really clear what differences there are anymore
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Their revenue growth is massive to the point of suspicion, especially since they admitted that they're using unaudited internal numbers that don't use GAAP. Why wouldn't they be using GAAP? The only explanation is that the GAAP numbers are pretty crappy. In fact, we know they're crappy because in court filings Anthropic stated they made 5 billion in total GAAP revenue between 2023 and the end of last year. The huge numbers you see are annualized projections that aren't representative of any actual revenue.
How does that follow? Taking their stated numbers literally (10x/year, $100M annualized in Jan 2024), you get:
Jan 2023: $10M annualized / 12 months per year = $0.833M in the month
Feb 2023: $0.833M * 1.21 monthly growth multiplier = $1.01M
...
Jan 2024: $8.33M ($100M annualized)
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Jan 2025: $83.3M ($1B annualized)
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Dec 2025: $688M
for a total of $3.94B. They put a "+" in their chart, which easily explains the 20% disparity. Their "0" in 2023 is a literal rounding error at $35M for the entire year.
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I guess I don't really understand why you mention this?
I like using AI, I find it extremely useful for many things (and useless for many others).
I don't care if AI companies earn $0.50 or $100 billion annually. I'm not an investor in them, it doesn't matter. I use whatever AI tools are available to me at a price and quality level that I find reasonable. I don't care if openAI and Anthropic explode, they'll be replaced by a better run company who can sell me AI tokens instead.
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Of course they are representative of some actual revenue. It's an annualized extrapolation of the past month of revenue. I don't deny that it doesn't mean that they made that $14B in the past year (but neither is anyone claiming it is), but it's not a random number as you seem to be suggesting. Huge growth in monthly income is real growth.
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